August 04, 2015 — OTRS, the world’s leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITIL® V3 compliant IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announces the first beta release of OTRS 5.
Release Details
Release name: OTRS 5 beta1
Release type: beta
Release date: August 04, 2015
What’s New
1. PRODUCTIVITY
OTRS is now optimized for use on different types and sizes of mobile devices.
Single-select and multi-select input fields have been modernized and provide advanced searching and filtering capabilities (thanks to Dusan Vuckovic at Mühlbauer).
Images can now be added/uploaded to the WYSIWYG editor using Copy&Paste and Drag&Drop from anywhere outside the application (in all browsers, without additional Add-On).
Improved ticket notification system. It is now possible to configure own ticket notifications with own trigger conditions and recipients. With OTRS Business Solution™, notifications can also be delivered via SMS and/or Notification Web View. The latter is a special screen in OTRS that holds all notifications of the agent; with this OTRS can be used entirely without an email client.
Statistics received a new graphical user interface which is much better accessible and helps to create great statistics quickly and easily.
Additionally, statistics support the new time periods “quarter” and “half-year”
It is now possible to group action menu items in the ticket zoom screen. Less often used items can be grouped in a submenu, improving screen usage and clarity.
Ticket overviews can now display customer company data, thanks to Renée Bäcker.
The ticket process TransitionAction “TicketCreate” can now create tickets without articles.
2. SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE
The new OTRS Daemon handles all asynchronous and periodic tasks and replaces all previous OTRS cron jobs. In a clustered environment the load is automatically distributed over the nodes.
It is now possible to specify multiple readonly mirror (slave) databases for expensive computations such as statistics or fulltext searches to distribute the load among these database servers.
3. SECURITY
A new two-factor authentication layer allows added login security.
If entering a fixed username and password doesn’t satisfy your requirements, you can now additionally use the open standard for time based one-time passwords (RfC 6238, also known as Google Authenticator).
After having enabled the two-factor authentication, agents and customers can add a shared secret to their preferences and immediately start logging in using one-time passwords created by a compatible method of their choice (e.g. the Android Google Authenticator app).
4. WORKING WITH EXTERNAL SYSTEMS
A new XSLT based GenericInterface mapping module allows for arbitrarily complex user-defined data mapping.
5. INSTALLATION & ADMINISTRATION
The new OTRS console makes working on the commandline easy and fun. All commands have a consistent interface, useful documentation and provide helpful colored output.
Administrators can now specify a minimum log level to reduce logging volume, thanks to Renée Bäcker.
Overview screens in the admin area now show invalid entities in gray, making it easy to focus on active elements.
6. DEVELOPMENT
New powerful template engine based on Template::Toolkit.
A central object manager makes creating and using global objects much easier (thanks to Moritz Lenz @ noris network).
The OPM package format was extended to signal that a package has been merged into another package, allowing the package manager to correctly handle this situation on package installation or update.
Caching was centralized in one global cache object which also performs in-memory caching for all data.
Added cache benchmark script, thanks to ib.pl.
7. MORE ENHANCEMENTS
Added possibility to define a time difference for pending states during ticket create or update, using the generic ticket connector (GenericInterface), thanks to Frederic Van Espen.
Added support for SOAP requests with chunked Transfer-Encoding, thanks to Frederic Van Espen.
Added possibility to add or change auto-increment columns during ‘TABLE ALTER’ SQL statements for PostgreSQL.
Dropped HTML print view in favor of PDF.
Added possibility to execute any method of any object asynchronously using Kernel/System/AsynchronousExecutor.
Increased flexibility for time based generic agent jobs to be executed even each minute.
Added possibility to define read only SysConfig settings.
Added possibility to show tickets from sub-queues in AgenTicketZoom. Default on initial view is configurable (show or hide sub-queue tickets).
Updated 7 day stats dashboard widget to use d3 instead of flot.
Added the possibility to extract translation strings directly from Perl code.
Fixed wrong column types in PostgreSQL.
Added new function Kernel::System::HTMLUtils::HTMLTruncate(), to trim HTML strings without loosing the tag structure.
Added support for Gentoo/emerge in bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl, thanks to Elias Probst.
Only show article accounted time if there is a nonzero value, thanks to Paweł Bogusławski.
Removed support for pre output filters. This can cause bad performance problems and can be replaced by post output filters that render their own templates instead.
Improved performance of ticket merging in bulk action, thanks to Moritz Lenz.
Added possibility to use list of TicketIDs (array reference) as a parameter for TicketSearch().
Added searching for article flags, thanks to Moritz Lenz.
Added no match message for administration screens that use filters, thanks to S7.
Added link from dashboard queue overview to AgentTicketQueue for better usability, thanks to Norihiro Tanaka.
Added new console interface for a massively improved user and developer experience on the command line.
Added possibility to specify minimum log level, thanks to Renée Bäcker.
Added Ping() to Kernel::System::DB.pm API.
Improved full-text filters in Ticket::SearchIndex::Filters.
Show ‘add agent’ and ‘add group’ action in UserGroup overview, thanks to ReneeB.
Improved stop-word lists for StaticDB full-text index to improve performance of full-text searches. It is recommended to rebuild the full-text search index.
Added new indexes to link_relation table.
Added ACLs handling for Owner and Responsible on screen load for AgentTicketOwner and AgentTicketResponsible.
Important for Upgrading
From a previous version of OTRS 5:
Make sure you run bin/otrs.RebuildConfig.pl after the upgrade so that the configuration is refreshed. Otherwise the system may not work.
From OTRS 4.x: Please consult our admin manual for detailed instructions.
Bug Fixes
Addition to fix of Bug#10712 – Incorrect utf8 in ZZZAuto.pm (via SysConfig) also for hash keys.
Bug#11200 – Wrong realization of Dynamic Fields in SOAP Response.
Bug#10978 – AgentTicketCompose: Deactivate ArticleTypes isn’t possible.
Bug#11054 – HTMLUtils::Safety breaks links.
Bug#11029 – Improved wording for responsible to make it more consistent.
The detailed ChangeLog can be found at: https://github.com/OTRS/otrs/blob/rel-5_0_0_beta1/CHANGES.md.
Browser Support
JavaScript is required to use OTRS.
These browsers are not supported:
Microsoft Internet Explorer before version 10
Firefox before version 10
Safari before version 5
We recommend to use the latest version of your browser, because it has the best JavaScript and rendering performance. Dramatical performance varieties between the used browsers can occur with big data or big systems. We are happy to consult you on that matter.
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